Poultry Industry Virus

Poultry Industry Virus. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

A serious new form of viral poultry disease has been found in Washington State. Dr. Tim Baszler with Washington State University talks about this new threat to poultry producers.

BASZLER: The Infectious Bursal Disease is a disease that has been around for a long time and it’s worldwide. So these variants that occur within theism it’s a viral disease and the virus goes through genetic changes and some of the strains that come out from those recombination events end up being more virulent or causing more death loss in a flock.

Baszler says they first saw the IBDV infection show up in California back in 2008.

BASZLER: It’s controllable. They control it with vaccination and biosecurity like many poultry diseases. So it’s not something that’s going to wipe out all the chickens. So they call these strains very, virulent because instead of having the normal 2% mortality rate you might see with bursal disease in pullets it’s a disease of young chickens. They might be more like 30% mortality.

The big take away message though according to Baszler:

BASZLER: It’s not a human health issue, it’s not a food safety issue. But mostly we wanted to remind people to get their death losses checked out. What’s really causing that increased mortality event. Get some veterinarian involved or get some laboratory confirmation of what’s causing the death loss and then remind people about biosecurity.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.